Thursday, 17 July 2014

Google has added new translation features, making it easy to edit translation search terms, change languages or hear the translations directly within search.

Going off a tip from @WilliamHarvey, when searching the word “translate,” Google now delivers a quick search option for entering text or choosing the translation language via a dynamic knowledge graph box as shown in this screen shot:

Once a full translation search query has been entered, Google offers both the text translation or the option to hear the audio version of the translated word or phrase.

“It is indeed a new feature with added translate tools directly within search,” confirmed a Google spokesperson, “You can say ‘translate where is the closest museum into French’ and you can now edit the text, change the input and output languages, and hear the translation spoken back to you more than once.”

Wednesday, 21 May 2014

Google has confirmed they have released a new algorithm update to their Payday Loan Algorithm update over this weekend.

This algorithm specifically targets “very spammy queries” and is unrelated to the Pandaor Penguin algorithms. A Google spokesperson told us:

Over the weekend we began rolling out a new algorithmic update. The update was neither Panda nor Penguin — it was the next generation of an algorithm that originally rolled out last summer for very spammy queries.

This comes with at no surprise to most SEOs and Webmasters who watch the space. There was a tremendous of rumors and signals of a major update over the weekend, intensifying over the past couple days as webmasters began to look at their analytics and the update has continued to roll out through Google.

The original Payday Loan Algorithm launched just about a year ago on June 11, 2013. Back then, Google’s Matt Cutts told us the algorithm impacted roughly 0.3% of the U.S. queries, but Matt said it went as high as 4% for Turkish queries were Web spam is typically higher.

Google told us this specific update is an international rollout and it affects different languages to different degrees, but this impacts English queries by about 0.2% to a noticeable degree. Here is a video back when Matt Cutts of Google announced the update was coming back in 2013:

Tuesday, 13 May 2014

In Google’s Matt Cutts latest video, he answers a question I personally asked about what he regrets, what decision he regrets making in the past related to webspam. My question specifically was:

Was there a key moment in your spam fighting career where you made a mistake that you regret, related to spam?

Matt answered it in than four minutes explained he regrets not acting sooner on (1) paid links and (2) content farms.

Google’s Paid Links Regret

Matt explained that several years ago at a search conference in San Jose, a well-known SEO told him that paid links are too common and there are no ways for Google to fight against it. That is when Matt said he realized that Google has made a mistake and they allowed paid links that passed PageRank to go too far. So in 2005 or so, Google cracked down heavily on paid links and now at this point, Matt said “most people” realize paid links are against Google’s guidelines, possibly against the FTC’s guidelines, that they have algorithms that fight against it and also manual actions around paid links. But Matt regrets not taking action sooner and waiting too long.

Google’s Content Farms Regret

The second regret Matt admitted to was around not acting sooner on content farms. Matt Cutts explained that early on, he did get some user complaints about the horrible user experience some of these content farms had. But when Matt himself went to one of the sites based on a search on how to fix a toilet in his home, he felt the user experience was good. He said he “over generalized” based on that one example, when he should have looked at the site overall and not just one page.

Because of that over generalization, Google didn’t act as fast as they should have on content farms and thus it became more of an issue on the web and for Google to deal with. Here Matt is specifically talking about Panda.

Matt did say that Google does do a lot of “great work” and finds it “rewarding” on the whole. But at the same time, he said he always “wonders” if you could do better by acting one way or another.

Wednesday, 2 April 2014

In today’s video from Matt Cutts, Matt answered a real question from Dave in the UK, who asked, “When will Google stop updating its search results?” The answer was never! And to prove his point, Matt animated his shirt to change different colors and then overlay flowers on top of the shirt.

I made an animated GIF image to show the various colors and tricks with the shirt but the video is below. In short, Google won’t stop changing, like Matt’s shirt that day.

He said that you should not delete or remove the original disavow file when uploading a new one. He said instead, upload the new one, which will replace the old disavow file. The reason he said was because when you delete the old one and upload a new one, it generates two emails to the Google team and may confuse them when review manual actions.

While I was researching last week’s article, I saw the site ranking at No. 8 for the term web design. Today, I’m seeing it at No. 48 for that same query.

But the more obvious indicator of a penalty is that the site no longer ranks for its own name, Web Design Library.

If you missed the original story, someone using the name “Vince” and tweeting from the@vitaliykoloswdl account was reaching out via Twitter to renew paid link agreements with a number of companies. One of the biggest was T-Mobile, as shown in this conversation that began in February:

But if you look through that account’s tweets, it appears that “Vince” isn’t just reaching out to renew some two-year-old paid links, he’s also tweetingatdozensofcompaniesaskingtocontact their “link building guy” or “marketing guy” — often mentioning “link building” and “cooperation” between his site and theirs. (Whatever he’s doing, and no matter where you stand on the ethics of buying/selling links, Twitter isn’t the place for it.)

What About T-Mobile & Others?

At the moment, I’m not seeing that T-Mobile has been penalized. It still shows up in Google’s search results for its own name, as well as for prime queries like “cell phones” and “samsung galaxy s4.” And SearchMetrics’ SEO Visibility tool isn’t showing any significant drop in T-Mobile’s visibility.

Why not? It could be that Google hasn’t penalized T-Mobile (and the other link buyers) yet, it could be that there’s not enough evidence that the link actually was bought, or it could be something entirely different. We don’t know. It’s worth mentioning again that, when Google webspam chief Matt Cutts saw the Twitter exchange last week, he directed an “I’m watching you” tweet at “Vince” and not at T-Mobile or any of the other accounts that “Vince” was tweeting at.

Brands aiming to protect themselves from trademark infringement in paid search are often met with white noise after they submit complaints to the search engines. They typically aren’t told if any action was taken — and even more frustrating, if no action was taken and/or why.

To help solve this problem, BrandVerity has added a process to its paid search ad monitoring system to give clients direct feedback from Google and the Yahoo Bing Network on trademark violation complaints.

After reporting a violation, BrandVerity clients will be alerted when an infringing ad has been disabled. If an ad is not taken down, the support teams at Google or Bing will respond with an explanation of why the ad is allowed to keep running.

“We’re very excited to have Google and Bing involved here. With their feedback, our clients can really close the loop on trademark abuse. Having the assurance that an ad was truly taken down—and knowing when it was taken down—provides some much-needed visibility and transparency into the trademark complaint procedure. We look forward to seeing an ever clearer boost to our clients’ paid search campaigns because of this new feature,” BrandVerity CEO, Dave Naffziger wrote via email.

The functionality is live globally with Google and in the US and Canada with the Yahoo Bing network, with plans to expand coverage.